ITP Techblog

Be a teacher. Please?

Not full-time, necessarily, or as a fixed commitment, but whenever the opportunity arises, teach.

Because, in the ICT world, sharing your knowledge can benefit you, your students, and the profession, at large.

So, challenge yourself to speak in front of large crowds, write a blog, or publish your code. That is teaching.

People often feel they must have special credentials to share knowledge, confusing "authoritative" with "authority." The former means you can speak confidently about a topic you know, while the latter means you are considered an expert in your field. You don't have to be an expert to teach.

Start young

Sharing knowledge is an under-appreciated skill, however important to growing a career.

For example, becoming a team leader isn't just about having been at the company the longest, ideally, or having the strongest technical skills (although that is helpful). It is about how well you prioritise, manage time, delegate, and mentor a team in a cooperative, constructive way.

Ambassador programmes such as Future in Tech and IITP's ICT-Connect programme can help young IT professionals develop such skills. The IITP's initiative, ICT-Connect, is a New Zealand-wide outreach programme to secondary schools designed to increase the visibility and desirability of tech careers. Future in Tech is also a great programme, run by IPENZ (the Engineering body) and focusing on broad engineering pathways including software development.

The initiatives train you to address large groups, hone your knowledge, and impart advice and experiences. Young professionals that participate in ICT-Connect can not only help themselves become leaders in their field, but can also foster the ICT talent of tomorrow. You should get involved.

Mentors, not drill sergeants

You'd be surprised how rare it is to find mentoring, leadership and teaching in IT.

Sure, people will show you how to optimise a block of code, or how to branch and merge that code base correctly, but when it comes to actual mentoring, it's way harder to find people who can do it well.

A drill sergeant motivates a team to fall in, by demand, not by developing a rapport, or commanding respect. There's a huge distinction there.

Commanding respect means your team relates to you, trusts you and feels that you have the proven capability to make decisions for the good of the team. Demanding respect implies enforcement of authority, defensive management, and driving a team based on strictly selfish motivations, such as how a team's performance reflects on its leader.

Adopting a teaching or mentoring role requires us to consider everyone's learning styles, their cultural biases, and personality types to get the best out of them.

This is particularly hard for IT professionals because, generally speaking, we are an introverted group. There is a desire to please, which makes conflicts more complex.

Assuming an authoritarian style simply won't work as well as having the assertiveness and confidence to guide team members in a non-threatening and judgmental way. This is especially true for non-technical areas: client relations, time management and the other "soft" skills that take longer to develop.

Developing managers

We pay attention to developing technical personnel, but what about managers?

Do we do enough to help grow managers and team leaders from within the organisation and develop their leadership skills?

As managers, performance criteria are often centred around financial results, service level KPIs, growth targets and so on, but are we setting clear criteria for evaluating performance based on how we've grown our direct reports? How do companies know if they're growing exceptional management talent if the managers themselves are being left alone and not given that same opportunity for mentoring and training?

The relationship between an employee and their line manager is one of the most important factors in job satisfaction.

If we're not developing effective managers, then we aren't building cohesive, gelled teams, and that has a direct cost impact on the business.

If we're creating the sort of work environment where our people are free to succeed then the company as a whole can succeed. Investing in and encouraging teaching and mentoring skills has direct, tangible impacts. We should talk less about identifying "natural leaders" and look more towards our "natural teachers".

Teaching is hard, so everyone should do it. Just a little. Start small; start soon.

Phil Wheeler is a senior developer at Intergen.